Tuesday, May 22, 2012

The Mother Pucker Stuffing Party Wrap Up

Please note that Kate is wearing Jimmy Choos. Also note that Lydia is wearing clogs. This was not planned.The only thing missing here is Guru Louise (cue the sound of stifled sobbing).

As you know, we wrapped up our Mother Pucker Mother's Day project by making 100 gift bags for every mom in every homeless and domestic violence shelter in our community. It was so awesome. Imagine a perfect, sunny late spring evening. There were about 50 women there to help and maybe twice as many kids running around the playground with an amazing Girl Scout troop watching them.

And we thought it would take 4 hours and that we would have to empty the meager Rants from Mommyland bank account to do it. We were done in an hour and a half. And we had enough stuff left over to make donations to the all 6 shelters. And each bag was HEAVY because it had so much stuff and so much LOVE in it.

Then after we cleaned everything up, and folded up all the chairs, and loaded up the gift bags, and made sure there were no empty Capri Suns packets left on the playground - we went to Kate's house and drank in her carport because we are classy, classy motherpuckers.

So, I have to admit something... I cried pretty much the entire time. I cried because there were people there who were forgoing their first ever Mother's Day gift in order to help others. I sobbed when I met someone who had been helped at Christmas (by one of you) and now wanted to pay it forward. I cried when people I have only seen on Facebook or in the comments section walked into the room and hugged me in real life.

I cried when people gave us amazing things. Like this:

These are 100 handmade Mother's Day cards. That my friend Ann made with her daughter because she wanted each mom to have something personal in each bag.

Our friend Rebekah, from Mom in a Million drove from Maryland about a million months pregnant with her adorable son. THANK YOU. People came and brought their precious, beautiful babies and let me hold them so I could smell their heads. So many people came through for us. Here's a really important one:

This is Meghan. She is made of awesome and extremely special and can do anything. I'm not even kidding. With adequate resources and enough coffee, she could straighten Afghanistan out in about 3 days. She is amazing and knows how to make things happen. Kate and I are so clueless. We know how to plan things and then not execute them properly. So we asked Meghan to be our executor and she said yes. THANK YOU, Meghan. We couldn't have done it without you.

I feel the need to say THANK YOU again and again. This experience has left Kate, Louise and I feeling profoundly grateful. We are very lucky in our personal lives. Thank you, husbands, for being awesome. We are doubly blessed to have each other and a group of friends who are kind and generous. It wasn't that long ago that I didn't have any friends, so trust me when I tell you that I am very grateful for this.

It even got written up in a local paper! The reporter was ADORABLE and I wanted to suck her into Mommyland immediately but I was scared she was think that was weird so I tried to act like a professional grown-up type person which probably accounts for why she spoke mostly to Kate.

We're grateful for all of you. We're part of a community that makes jokes about douche-nozzles and junk-punching and still makes time to help other moms. We got an email over the weekend and it had me crying all over again, because of the awesomeness of MommyLand. THANK YOU.

I wanted to let you know that you also inspired me to put together 'loot bags' for the moms at our local women and children's shelter. While I dropped the ball on getting this project started in time (procrastination strikes again!) and was not able to get together bags for the 68 mothers in the transitional apartments, I did manage to put together care packages for the 13 moms who are currently residing in the shelter. And I already have committed donations for *next* year, so that we can get *all* the moms covered.

It is such a simple thought and we are even people who actively volunteer in other areas of the community, and yet I would not have thought to do this -- nor definitely have been spurred to actually do it after having the thought -- without the fact that you guys banded together to get it done as well. You've started a great thing that will (at least here, on our end) be going forward and continuing for years to come.